22 November 2014

22nd of November

Farm news
Weather hot, like in the mid-30's (degrees C) hot for a couple of days this week so the entire farm was off. Its back into the upper-20's so I have the Parallella's and Raspberry Pi's going again. I have been running the Intel-GPU's overnight as well.

The Intel-GPU machines are all doing Asteroids work. Credits are around 14 million so still quite a way to go before it catches up to the other projects. The Parallella's and Pi's are doing Einstein work. I have 2 Parallella's and 6 Raspberry Pi's.

I was in the computer shop this morning dropping off parts for the 2nd new build machine. They are still waiting on memory before they can be completed. It seems DDR4 memory is still in fairly short supply at the moment.

Pi B+ rebuild
A day after I did the last post I went and upgraded the B+ Raspberry Pi and after rebooting it refused to come back. I ended up wasting the next 4 hours restoring from the official image (downloaded back in June) and then having to upgrade it to get it back to what it had and remembering all the things that I normally change from the standard Pi image. I have since taken a snapshot of it so at least I have an image I can just dump onto it should it happen again.

Before anyone asks "why didn't you use one of the other Pi's images" I would point out they are all B models. Their image is a bit different and doesn't work on the B+ which is why I had to go back to the official image and then upgrade it.

Ideally I would like a stripped down image that doesn't have all GUI stuff that wastes space and CPU time. X11 and the desktop stuff are all useless when remotely accessing the Pi. I do remove some of the packages that come with Raspbian but not enough to get rid of x11 entirely.